About the Project
Car crashes kill more people than guns in California. Over the past decade, 40,000 people have lost their lives — an increase of 55 percent from a decade prior.
The crashes threaten the lives of nearly every one of the 38 million people who live here. They shatter innocent families that are left to reckon with the emptiness of a life unfulfilled.
Too often, California families are also forced to confront another question: Shouldn’t this tragedy have been prevented?
Over the past year, CalMatters has provided them with an answer to that question.
In a reporting feat that is equal parts methodical and shocking, Robert Lewis and Lauren Hepler revealed how the state of California routinely issues driver’s licenses to people with long histories of dangerous behavior. In case after case, they documented how the Department of Motor Vehicles ignored bright red flags to hand driver’s licenses to people who would go on to kill. Some killed again.
In a relentless running series, they showed that:
- DMV officials may call driving a privilege, but they treat it as a right. Nearly 40% of the drivers charged with vehicular manslaughter since 2019 had a valid license. That includes a driver with two separate convictions for vehicular manslaughter, for crashes that killed a 16-year-old girl in 2009 and a 25-year-old woman in 2020. In July 2024, the DMV issued him a driver’s license.
- County court systems across the state simply failed to report hundreds of vehicular manslaughter convictions to the DMV, allowing roadway killers to improperly keep their licenses. “How can he keep driving?” said the mother of an 18-year-old killed in a car crash.
- As drunken driving deaths in California have risen at twice the rate of other states, California’s outdated DUI laws fail to differentiate between drunken drivers who made a dangerous mistake but learn from it and those who refuse to stop endangering lives. Drunken and drugged driving is now so common that drivers routinely rack up four, five, six DUIs. One woman just got her 16th.
- When confronted with the skyrocketing death numbers, officials with the power to do something about it — the governor, legislators, DMV leaders and the courts — failed to act. “If these people’s children had been killed by a drunk driver, there is no way they would be objecting to this,” said one grieving parent after seeing their advocacy fail.
- A diversion program has allowed some people charged with vehicular manslaughter to keep the case off their driving record. That means drivers can face more penalties for a speeding ticket than for running someone over and killing them.
- Though state law authorizes the DMV to investigate drivers involved in a crash that kills or badly injures someone, agency data shows it rarely uses that power. After it issued a license to a driver with 17 tickets who’d recently killed a toddler, the DMV fought in court to keep the driver’s records from prosecutors.
